Ya want cute??? I'll give ya cute...

Let's just get one thing clear before we get started: I never intended for this blog to turn into Jon's Backyard Wildlife Adventures or whatever. It just turns out that I've had a couple of odd encounters in the last week or two. On to the story...

Maya (stalwart canine companion) and I made an interesting discovery on the way out for a walk this evening. As we were stepping off the back porch, I noticed a rather small, light brown, astonishingly cute ball of fur bouncing around in the grass looking rather hurried and very disoriented. With Maya's leash brought up to a more controllable length, we approached to find a panicked, and apparently orphaned, baby chipmunk.

The care we took to maintain several feet of distance from it (much to Maya's disappointment) wasn't enough to keep it from freezing in place. Was that terror? I'm not sure. In any case, I thought the best thing to do was to get Maya out of there and then go consult the wise and benevolent Internet for some advice. After a quick walk, I brought Maya back inside and did a little research.

As it turns out, most of the websites devoted to the rescue of orphaned chipmunks (okay, let's not pretend to be surprised that there are many, many of them) tell you the first thing to do is get them warm. They then go on to say what to feed them, what they like to drink, how to bathe them, what type of stories they like at bedtime, how to make noises like a mother chipmunk(!) and so on. Well, I wasn't about to do any full-time critter parenting, but there was also no way I could bring myself to leave this thing to fend for itself, either. It was clearly very young--at least 16 days, judging by the full coat and unopened eyes--and there was no sign of a mother anywhere nearby after about an hour of head scratching and net surfing.

So I went and got a box. And a stick. Why a stick? Well, the thing had flopped over on its back and opened its mouth wide when Maya and I first passed by. And it stayed that way. For a LONG time. I wasn't sure if it was playing dead, threatening a vicious attack or outstretching its limbs to welcome the embrace of death, so I got a stick to give the thing a (gentle!) nudge to see if it was still with us.

It was. In fact, it made angry noises and latched onto the stick and wouldn't let go. Its grip was so firm that I was actually able to carry it back to the porch that way.

Yeah. Me walking across the yard with a baby chipmunk on a stick. Kinda wish I'd taken a picture of that. Instead, I have this to offer you:

That would be the stick in the foreground. Like you care about the stick.

Okay. We made it to the porch. Now what? Back to the Internet...

On a side note, if I ever have a real emergency I'm screwed. I don't think I'd know what to do without doing a Google search. I have visions of some horrible cooking accident:

"Oh, SHIT! I'm on FIRE from making a Pop-Tart!!! What do I do?!?!"

"Wait! I know this. Calm down, Jon. You know this. It's 'Stop, Drop and...' Um...'Robot'? No. 'Ranch'? Ranch dressing! No. OW!!! Burning. What is it? Dammit. Crap! This hurts. Okay. Google: 'what to do when you're on fire'..."

Anyway, I do another search on, like, rescue orphan Disney characters or whatever and eventually I find a list of volunteer wildlife rehabilitators throughout New Hampshire broken out by county. A few phone calls later, a very nice lady named Joanne answers. I tell her the story, she tells me to get the chipmunk (or "the chippy," as she called it) warm by filling some bottles with hot water and putting them in the box with some towels. All I have to do is put the little critter in the box like that and bring it to her. She'll do the rest.

I, of course, love that so I line the box with some paper towels, coax the chipmunk into grabbing the stick again and lower him/her (no, I didn't check) inside.

Say it with me: "Awwwwww..."

Chipmunk's feelings on that course of action, however, are decidedly less positive than mine. 'Turns out it's kinda bitey and tends to poop when agitated. Being meddled with and put in a box via stick is, apparently, very agitating.

Wild animals are just that: wild animals. Don't be fooled by this thing's "I'm like a Bambi that fits in your pocket" cuteness. It's not above puncturing your finger or dropping a deuce in your presence.

Once I got the thing in the box, I went and filled two water bottles with hot tapwater and got a bunch more paper towels to keep them from rolling around and crushing the already irate chipmunk.

Rather ungrateful, but still cute.

Then I loaded the box into the car and we hit the road.

Still angry, but clearly traveling in style...

A twenty-minute car ride later, Bitey and I arrived at Joanne's home and she gave a quick inspection and deftly wrangled him/her into a small cage equipped with plenty of blankets and a heating pad. I thought of asking to take a picture of that, too, but I sensed that would have been creepy. Joanne's assessment was that Bitey was looking a little shocked but should be fine.

That's about all the story there is to tell. I haven't made up my mind whether or not to call and check on the progress (again, the creepy thing) but if I do I'll keep you updated.

Thanks for reading and keep an eye out for your woodland friends.

More Photoshop Stuff...

Picking up steam. I am really, really happy with this:


I've gone completely mad with taking old notebooks and sketchbooks, scanning in phrases and drawings and then mixing them with digital photos. This is really working out well and there's a sense of great potential to explore what is, for me, an entirely different medium.

Not sure how well it's going to translate with the smaller, .gif version above but one of the things that has been the most rewarding is the amount of depth that resulted. On the full-size version (3000x4200 pixels) you can zoom in on a space as small as one square inch and basically find an entirely new piece within that space.

This collage came with a couple of lessons. For instance, without realizing it I created a MASSIVE file on my first pass. See, I originally wanted a print version that would be 11 x 17 inches in size. I went ahead and created an 11 x 17 canvas and started dropping layer, after layer, after layer in place without realizing that I was working with the resolution set to 600 pixels/inch in color.

Yeah. Whoops.

"Hello, 919.9M file that takes 5 minutes just to save!"

The problem was quickly addressed by taking the rez down to 300 pixels/inch and knocking the canvas down to 10 x 14 with a margin for that "finished" look.

All it needs now is a title. "Consolation" keeps popping into my head.

On to the next one...

Man, it's been a busy couple weeks...

I've been bouncing around between writing new music for SUMO, learning more stuff in Photoshop, taking Dreamweaver MX 2004 lessons at LYNDA.COM (which have been fantastically helpful and I urge you to check out that link for their great training library), applying the new stuff I'm learning to the SUMO page and all my other day-to-day stuff.

My daily routine has basically consisted of getting up at 6:30 am (+4 or 5 "snoozes"), going to work, coming home, shoving food in my facehole, getting on the computer until my eyes can't take it anymore, and then jumping on the guitar/bass/notebook to work on songs. I usually crash at about 12:30 am or so.

And on top of all that, I found time to take pictures of a somewhat unusual visitor to my back porch. Behold the Walking Stick...




This interesting little bug showed up on my screen door and I couldn't resist harrassing it for some photos. No worries, though: I put it back where I found it when I was done. You can see that I tried to get closeups and different angles but both my camera and my photography skills leave much to be desired. Managed to get a nice pic of my pale, meaty hand.

Pretty cool, though, eh? I've seen a walking stick exactly one other time and that was a couple of years ago in the same spot: the screen door on the back porch. I had pics of that one, too, but lost them in a hard drive crash.

Anyway, bit of a surprise for me as I didn't know you could find these guys 'round these parts.

A Sterile Eye

What's up with all these blogs and other websites that look like they were designed by Apple Store employees? Are we trying to make the Internet a landscape of soothing monochrome studded sparingly with jewel-like buttons? I realize I'm not winning any awards for web design over here but this trend is a little too utilitarian (read: boring) for my tastes as a consumer.

There's plenty of bad design and general ugliness in the world wide web, but that's no excuse for blandness. Not that everyone should go back to creating elaborate Flash intros again, mind you. I'm just saying.

Oh, and before I start getting hate mail from Apple Store employees, let me make my feelings emphatically clear: I dislike you. Don't waste your time emailing me because I don't care. I get enough of your useless pomposity on those rare occasions when I venture into (or hurry past) your place of employment. Save it.

Photoshop of Horrors - Part 2

Another iteration of the same piece (it's a big image, so apologies for the long download).



Pardon the self-indulgence here, but the novelty of this whole thing hasn't worn off yet.

As you can see, some new elements have been added and others removed. The little silhouetted creatures lurking on the ground, for example, are now airbrushed and smudged out of the picture. They seemed a little goofy, even taking into consideration the general comic book vibe of the drawing. I also lightened the whole thing by removing two layers of background color which I started to feel were overkill.

After that came the texture to the sky. That's just a close up photo of a metal lantern I have here at home with a leaf pattern in it. The photo was imported, converted to grayscale, scuffed up a little and then faded into the background. The light and dark patches worked out well and I like that it was an element that stuck to the flora motif.

Next were the branches and buildings at the bottom, which were just found images doctored up, chopped and faded. The branches make sense for obvious reasons; the buildings are there because of the story behind this character (and that's a very long story, indeed). More branches in the upper corners may be in order but I want to play with some text first and see what happens.

I think it's starting to look rather Metal, don't you think? I'm not done messing with it yet. I need to put some stuff in the sky. Text seems appropriate. Which text? That is the question...

Photoshop of Horrors

I've been getting Photoshop lessons from friend and artist BOY. Some of you might recognize that name from all the artwork on the SUMO site and basically all of our t-shirts and show posters. The dude's got talent and more technical knowledge than is considered safe for humans to have, to say nothing of his relentless work ethic.

During one of our many, lengthy conversations about horror movies, I let slip that I once had aspirations of being a graphic artist. Back in the day I filled sketchbooks with drawings of Frank Miller's Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the Eastman & Laird version, thank you), Wolverine and a million or so of my own weird inventions. I went on to confess that I hadn't done any real drawing in about a decade, but that I had the itch to do some kind of visual art again.

Here's the great thing about BOY: when you tell him something like that, he has a tendency to remember it. He also tends to take action on it. Then he shares his knowledge and starts harrassing the shit out of you until you get off your ass and make something happen.

Next thing I know, I'm dusting off sketch pads and scanning my old drawings to start breathing new life into them. Old ink drawings plus BOY's secret recipe for the effective use of layering equals hours of fun for yours truly. Here's the result of my first efforts:


Apologies for the relative lack of detail, but the original image is actually quite large (11x17 scanned at 600 dpi) and wouldn't fit on your screen. That notwithstanding, this ain't bad at all, if I say so myself. Exactly the mood I envisioned when I first drew this guy years ago. And I'm not even close to done messing with it.

I recognize that I'm a long, long way from the title of Photoshop guru but this is opening up a whole new universe for me. I mean, this is me one week after first getting the keys to the kingdom, so to speak. Suddenly the need to get pen to paper has returned with a vengeance. I mean, how cool is it that a drawing which sat unviewed for 10+ years gets pulled out, dusted off and given color?

This latest schooling actually goes hand-in-hand with the web design advice he's been giving me, which led to the recent overhaul of SUMO Kommand Central, so basically the last month or so has been very informative and extremely gratifying. I'm getting a lot of stuff done and a lot of light bulbs are lighting up over my shiny, bald head.

I'm making art again. I could get used to this.

I'm Looking for Recommendations

I need to find some kind of template that I can easily drop into Blogger to make this site look less like a typical Blogger site. Something a little less "canned" and more subdued/minimal is better suited to my tastes.

Do you know of anything I could use to that end? Give me a holler if you do.